Thursday 21 July 2011

Are you wasting money on training courses?

"To teach is also to learn"
Anon

When a group of coaches and trainers get together we will often reflect on how much we learn from our clients, in many cases I think we can learn more from our clients’ sessions, than they do themselves, and if you read my client testimonials you will realise how much clients benefit from coaching.

A lot of research has been done over the years to study retention rates of information and comparing how the information was delivered.

Presupposing that you attend a course because you want to access the information so you can retain it and use it, rather than you want your CPD hours, how do you assess if the course you are planning to attend is going to be good value for money?

As a student revising for part 4 several of my friends and I developed a really efficient way of revising what we thought was a fairly dull subject, and yet despite the fact we actually spent very little time revising we all did remarkably well and were very confident as we went into our exams. I will explain how we did this later.

How many times have you been to a course and commented subsequently, ”I learned more in the bar afterwards than I did in the lecture.”?
Let us look at the results of the research.

Attending lectures will only provide a 5% retention rate of information, although this rises to 20% if there is an audio- visual element.

Courses that include a demonstration or live link will increase your retention of information to 30%, which is still not great.

Discussion of the content with others will raise your retention rate to 50%, whilst practice doing the new skill being learned raises this to a 75% retention rate.

However the most significant retention rates of information of 90% are only achieved when you then teach others.

As dentists we are very keen to get the best value for money, and this should apply to our courses as well as our materials and equipment.

So my recommendation when you are looking to learn a new proficiency whether it be a clinical skill or developing an aspect of your practice management, developing your vision, time management, financial control, customer service and communication, team work, sales, marketing, leadership, business systems, practice environment, or work life balance, choose one that has the following;
• An opportunity to watch or listen to demonstrations
• An opportunity to discuss what you are learning with colleagues either during or after the event
• An opportunity to practice, rehearse or hands- on experience
• An opportunity to feedback and teach others.

As for the successful revision strategy, we had a selection of past papers, each of us took one question, revised the answers for that question, we then got together generally over a drink or a meal and in turn discussed what we had learned, and developed a model answer to each question, using two of the techniques to enhance information retention, discussion and teaching others.

For more information about accelerated learning courses for dentists and their teams call me, 01296 770462.

Let me know you experience of training events good and bad by commenting below.

No comments:

Post a Comment